Saturday, May 19, 2007

endorsement of full panoply of Bush lawbreaking

"Compared to the likes of, say, David Addington and John Yoo, it is certainly true that James Comey, John Ashcroft and Jack Goldsmith had slightly greater limits on what they would tolerate. But the praise for the latter has become excessive. The "heroic" trio still ultimately endorsed the unquestionably illegal warrantless eavesdropping program, along with the whole host of other radical and lawless Bush policies, from the indefinite and process-less detention of even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil to secret Eastern European prisons and a whole range of "enhanced interrogation techniques."[]One can accept that Ashcroft, Comey and Goldsmith are not quite as tolerant of blatant lawbreaking as Cheney, Addington and Yoo. But that is an extremely low bar. It is not entirely unlike heaping praise on someone who embezzles and commits fraud all because they drew the line and refused to cooperate with their comrades when it came time to, say, commit arson or murder. Comparatively speaking, they may be preferable to Dick Cheney, but they are hardly paragons of political virtue or stalwart defenders of the rule of law. Quite the opposite.[]The danger from this misleading ritual is that the faux "dissenters" -- who are in fact loyal Bush ideologues in every meaningful sense -- come to been seen as principled heroes and thus define the outer limits of legitimate deviation from the Bush agenda. And any objections to whatever policies they endorse come to be seen as shrill and unserious (after all, even the Principled, Nonpartisan and Independent James Comey/John McCain/Arlen Specter have accepted it).

Just as Colin Powell came to mark the outermost limits of legitimate objections to the Iraq invasion, or the way McCain did with torture, or Specter on eavesdropping (whereby their ultimate embrace of Bush's extremism is deemed dispositive because of how "principled" and "independent" they proved themselves to be), turning James Comey or Jack Goldsmith into the Maverick Supreme Ethical Heroes is both inaccurate and counter-productive, given their hearty endorsement of the virtually full panoply of Bush lawbreaking."

* wonkette has some of the freepi calls for impeachment wrt the immigration bill - for example:

"My husband just recently retired and we where planning on going back to Texas but we are now seriously considering Australia. It looks better and better each minute. Our kids want to leave also !!!"

"The administration, it appears from Mr. Comey's testimony, was willing to go forward, against legal advice, with a program that the Justice Department had concluded did not "honor the civil liberties of our people." Nor is it clear that Congress was adequately informed. The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen."

"It's impossible to draw neat lines around which elements of the mushrooming U.S. attorneys scandal violate the law and which are encompassed in Bush's larger worldview that life happens at the pleasure of the president. But these discussions raise the bigger question: How can the president ever break a law, so long as he insists he is the law? And how can the rest of us know if he's broken a law, if we've absolutely no idea what he's been doing?"

"President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said he would not allow two former premiers who are also his main political rivals to return to Pakistan to take part in upcoming elections, according to a report Friday.

The announcement seems likely to deepen Pakistan's political crisis, in which the military leader faces accusations of authoritarianism as well as a growing challenge from Islamic extremists.[]Musharraf has said he will ask lawmakers in the outgoing parliament to elect him to another five-year term as president. He has also resisted calls to give up his post as army chief."